Thursday, March 24, 2005

High Ambient Temperature

A technical discourse is hardly something anyone would welcome in this customarily frivolous blog, so this one shall only make a passing mention of the technical - and not dwell on it, thus saving many an awkward moment for the millions who shall read this.

Chennai's ambient, I must say has become a victim of the second law of thermodynamics. Its entropy has increased to hitherto unheard of levels - by virtue of the night time ambient flirting with 27 Centigrade and the day time ambient flirting with something that seems enough to melt even the most self respecting of self respecting metals. Water vapour has also decided to generate entropy by mixing with air - and the psychrometric charts show a configuration quite distant from that utopian 22-25C 'comfort'.

For the non-technically inclined among my millions of readers, I must first congratulate you and thank you throughly for actually getting this far. Lesser mortals would have turned back. I will reaward your patience by transalating the above technical balderdash. To put it in a nutshell - it's so hot and humid here that it is unsufferable. Highlands are being craved for.

I shall resist all temptation to talk of Rayleigh - Benard convection and Mountain breeze - and why the highlands are cooler, since I do love my non technical readers too. And of course, I don't know jackshit about Rayleigh Benard Convection (something that the next few days shall change). Suffice it to say that ample experimental evidence exists to conclusively state that the highlands are immensely cooler than the plains.

The cooler mountains remain pipe dreams! We are confined to the miserable plains - we are doomed to eternal sweat.

While we are on the subject of sweat, I just cannot help wonder why sweat feels sticky - while a bath seems so refreshing. Lots of people say it's salt. So, I propose the following experiments.

Stop eating salt. Move to Chennai then. If you do sweat (that's why you moved to Chennai) - and do not feel sticky, then it's not salt. If it isn't salt then is it something organic? If it IS organic, does it burn? If it burns, will it solve our energy crisis? If it solves our energy crisis, will Shell, ONGC and BP get scared? Will these oil companies lobby to ban sweat? Will Manmohan Singh, therefore, want to ban sweat? Will our saviours (viz. Laloo and Hark. Singh. Surjeet) threaten to withdraw support to the govt if sweat is banned? Will the UPA govt. fall? So, if the UPA govt. falls, then odds are sweat contains something besides salt.

Smear some salt all over yourself and walk in a railway station. Better still, jump in a tub of brine in a state of undress and start walking on a busy station - say Chennai Central. Count the number of flies stuck to various parts of your body. If the flies exceed a critical number (which needs to be determined by a literature survey) - then it would be reasonable to assume that salt makes you sticky.

Getting back to the eternal heat and all the misery connected to it; if someone asks you why IITians leave India - the answer is quite simple. IIT tortures you in the most inhumane of inhumane climates for five of the most important years of your life. IITians don't leave India for better opportunities. It's just that the climate in the USA is a lot cooler.